'Monkey business' isn't just for scientists anymore

'Monkey business' isn't just for scientists anymore
Rest of us can hypothesize on Darwinian evolution, too
By JOHN PERRY and DR. MARVIN OLASKY


EIGHTY years ago this July, John Thomas Scopes was convicted in a Tennessee court of teaching that man was descended from a lower order of animals. Far from ending the evolution/creation debate, the infamous Monkey Trial of 1925 set the stage for a conflict that continues undimmed.

There's even an argument about the argument. Many in the larger scientific community refuse to acknowledge any legitimate question still exists. Newspaper headlines prove otherwise, as school boards in Kansas, Georgia, Texas and elsewhere continue their pitched battles over whether Darwinian evolution is or is not an unassailable fact.

In history, as in the contemporary discussion, the pathway to truth is a slippery slope. Inherit the Wind is wonderful entertainment but, as its creators wrote in their long-forgotten introduction, it "does not pretend to be journalism. It is theater." The fact is that Scopes wasn't even a biology teacher; he coached football and taught algebra, chemistry and physics.

Neither Scopes nor the state prosecutors had any initial interest in evolution one way or the other. The whole business was cooked up by the American Civil Liberties Union, which at the end of World War I found itself with no more conscientious objectors to defend and in need of a cause. The city fathers of Dayton, Tenn., agreed to sponsor a test case of the so-called "anti-evolution" law because they thought the publicity would be good for business.

The position Scopes so gamely defended still stirs high passions and rightly so. What we believe about where we came from affects what we believe about everything else. And because it is so important, the evolution/creation question deserves our most tireless and transparent efforts at uncovering its truth.

In this, the scientific community has done themselves and the rest of us a disservice. They insist that only their credentialed peers have any right to speak on the subject. But nagging questions remain about Darwinism based on facts that don't change whether the questioner is a scientist, writer, philosopher or shoe salesman, Christian or cat worshipper.

Random, purposeless activity tends toward disorder and not order. Banging on the keyboard without looking produces more disorderly results than purposeful typing. Throwing parts over your shoulder into a pile is less likely to result in a functioning bicycle than assembling them purposefully with the proper tools. Could random, purposeless evolution really have transformed biotic ooze into Beethoven?

True, natural selection accounts for minor, temporary, reversible changes. It can make a bird beak larger or smaller, a moth wing darker or lighter. But where did the beak or the wing come from in the first place? That's a fair question that the Darwinian mechanism cannot satisfy.

Is there an answer in Intelligent Design theory, which holds that life was created by an unknown but purposeful intelligent entity?

Maybe.

Could the Creator God have done it?

Not if we must, as scientists insist, exclude all metaphysical possibilities.

But why let scientists call all the shots? The rest of us can hypothesize too.

Last year in a cover article on evolution, National Geographic heralded Darwinism as "a theory you can take to the bank." Yet, later the same article allowed that "the fossil record is like a film of evolution from which 999 of every 1,000 frames have been lost." What other scientific theory can you take to the bank when 99.9 percent of it is conjecture?

As long as those whom Intelligent Design founder Phillip Johnson calls "the Mandarins of science" try to limit participation in the evolution debate to people who agree with them, the rest of us should be suspicious of their motives and their results. And we'll never know for sure how Beethoven or any of the rest of us really got here.

Olasky is the adviser to President Bush who coined the term "compassionate conservatism" in his 1992 book "The Tragedy of American Compassion." Perry is a historian and best-selling author who recently co-authored the new book, "Monkey Business: The True Story of the Scopes Trial" (Broadman & Holman, May 2005), which unearths controversial new details about the case.

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/editorial/outlook/3269881